


On Some Faraway Beach

by hotot



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Canon Character of Color, Canon Compliant, Cassian Backstory, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, F/M, Gap Filler, Gen, Rogue One Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-09-12 17:07:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9081748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotot/pseuds/hotot
Summary: Until that day, Cassian had not thought kindness was something people died of.~~~Cassian's climb during the last ten minutes on Scarif.Ending spoilers ahead.





	

_Unlikely_  
_I'll be remembered_  
_As the tide brushes sand in my eyes_  
_I'll drift away._

On Some Faraway Beach - Brian Eno

 

When Cassian fell, he didn’t expect to stop falling. He struck something solid on the way down, and then fell some more. But when he stopped short and lay still it came as a sharp, painful surprise, one that shattered ribs and knocked the wind from him so completely he knew he would never get it back.

Jyn left him there, sprawled and broken, and that was another surprise. Not an unwelcome one, but a surprise nonetheless. He thought her sentiment would demand that she not leave him behind. He let the fantasy of her pulling him up, unable to leave him, roll around in his brain as he sprawled, half broken, on the maintenance platform. But if she’d stayed, tried to help him up, tried to get him to climb with her, he would have… what, killed her and done it himself?

Yelled at her?

With what breath?

What was left in him that he could use to convince her that she needed to go?

But she went. She took one last look and scrambled up the face of the silo like a spider.

By now he should have known not to doubt her, but he was afraid of her reckless sentiment. The child in the crossfire on Jedha. How she’d gone catatonic during the mad dash off the planet as the Holy City was decimated by the… by the Death Star. How he was forced to drag her away from her father’s corpse without a hint of sympathy.

At some point along the way, Jyn Erso had learned that there was no room for sentiment in rebellion, and she left Cassian where he lay.

He needed to stop underestimating her. Jyn always did the right thing, even if she was a bit late in doing it. She was not loyal to anything but the next foothold, the next sweet-ache pull of muscles screaming, and his heart followed her up.

It was a good thing Cassian had always been a climber.

“Little beek-monkey,” mama called him. He always looked forward to the next great climb. The crater-fir trees made for the best heights. The massive trees only grew in the ash-rich soil of ancient asteroid impacts that pocked Fest’s temperate equator.

They were lucky to live there, so far from other people, where there were trees and room to breathe. Mountains guarded deep crater valleys, which in turn hid iridescent blue lakes, their jagged cliff-sides bright with the proud conifers.

Cassian lay on the platform that had saved him, and his hands clenched as he thought of room to breathe, thought of the trees. He could feel the rough bark scraping his hands when he raced his friends to the top, as high as they could go, and he always came down--hands and arms sticky with sap that would stay caked on his skin for days, his hair stuck through with green, fragrant needles.

When he saw the Imperial Cruisers, it was from his perch in a particularly tall crater-fir. The ships lanced through Fest’s purple-hazed atmosphere like arrows. Until that moment, Cassian had been happy as only a six-year-old in his favorite tree could be, but by the time he got down and made a run for home, he was too late to save the village, and too late to die with them. Mama’s hut was burned, and everyone was taken away, or they laid as twisted, oily skeletons and piles of ash. There was no in-between.

They came in the aftermath.

They found him up a tree at the edge of his mother's village, dehydrated and half starved. They pulled him down from the tree and he screamed and scratched like the beek-monkey he was, and then he went limp and didn’t move or speak for a week.

They explained that his village harbored Alliance sympathizers and that was why the Empire had come to Fest. Cassian didn't know what they meant by “sympathizers” until much later. Sympathy was a subcategory of kindness and he had never seen or felt anything but kindness before the Empire had come. And they came because of sympathy.

Until that day, Cassian had not thought kindness was something people died of.

After a week of soft food and soft words, he told the rebels his name. The Rebellion raised him, and trained him, and used him. They asked him to do things that were not kind, or sympathetic, and he did what he was asked. And more. It was hard. It did not become any easier the older he got, but it became natural, like a habit. Like climbing.

Not for the joy of it anymore, not ever again, but out of necessity.

He looked up now, and the data silo loomed above him. Just like the crater-firs, as big around but with many more handles.

He pulled his broken body upright, and it screamed at him to lay still. He’d earned a rest. The burnt-smell of his blaster wound made a sharp counterpoint to pain in his chest, sending reality fragmenting into past and present, and the hallucinatory bargaining, begging for what-ifs that he’d never fully explore.

He’d never see what might rise from the cratered ashes of a shattered Empire.

It didn’t matter. He was home, and his mama laughed. He was on Jedha, in awe of the temples. He was in a forest, and it smelled like fir and sky. He wasn’t in pain. He was free.

Several broken ribs protested. He couldn’t quite get enough oxygen with each panting breath, nostrils flaring, a great weight pressing down on his chest. His shoulder ached, and his fingers trembled on each upward lunge, climbing one handed, his arm with the injured shoulder tucked uselessly over the blaster hole in his gut.

This was just like the crater-firs. Just one foot, than another. One hand, grasping, hauling him higher, to the next branch. His shoulder screamed, he screamed, but still he climbed. His body knew this. So kind of the Empire to give him something so spectacularly easy to climb, even broken as he was.

He reached the snapping jaws of the ventilation shaft. Jyn had come this far, because she wasn’t stuck at the impasse. He hadn’t seen her fall.

What was the prayer? Cassian who had never prayed, let the litany of hope trickle through his mind, and fall from his lips.

_I am one with the force; the force is with me._

“I am one with the force; The force is with me.”

It was startling to learn that he was the sort of man who turned to prayer at the end of things. Cassian would blame that one on Chirrut Îmwe, as well as thank him for it.

Cassian took a breath so deep his lungs screamed, and he jumped.

It felt like falling, except he fell up. The vent snapped closed behind him and he braced himself, feet wide on either side of the narrow chamber, trembling.

He hauled himself onto the platform and his blaster was out without him knowing how it got into his hands. Krennic crowed and then he fell when Cassian’s shot burst through his chest.

Jyn looked at him with such pride.

Above them, a Star Destroyer cut through the blue-shifted shield gate like an arrow, and the deflector shield died.

Jyn. Jyn, she did _something,_ hit a big red button, flipped a switch. He watched her in awe, like he’d been looking for her his whole life, and then she was there, holding him up, hands checking his torso like it mattered how badly he was hurt, wincing at his ribs and the hole in his gut, but then Krennic stirred and she snarled.

Always reckless. His arm tightened around her shoulders.

_Shhh. Shhh._

“Leave it! Leave it.”

She stilled.

He said, “That's it.”

But he meant to say, _Don’t leave me now. Not here. Jyn, don’t leave me now that things have gone really bad._

She sagged against him like she was the one with a gut wound and a punctured lung, and he pulled her away from her vengeance as he pulled her away from the hologram on Jedha, as he pulled her away from the corpse of her father.

The planet killer did what it was built to do.

It was easy to get lost in her eyes as they rode the lift down the side of the Citadel, and he let himself sink into that thing he had always called weakness before. Sympathy, kindness. They leaned against the lift wall, the light slow and bleeding in flashes of shadow like a klaxon alarm but without the sound. He stared at her. He couldn’t help it. Green eyes, shot through with little flecks of gold, ringed in brown. It should be criminal offense to have eyes that beautiful. It created something bright and fierce in his chest. He couldn’t breathe.

She stared back. It was a good thing time was short, because surely if they’d had more of it she might eventually see through him, discover that in this specfic time and place he was kind, or sympathetic, but out there... it was different out there.

But now? He’d take it.

No promises or declarations. No words. She just gazed at him. Her eyes spoke of the honor she'd found a little too late, the horror that had gone on far too long. Her eyes held fear and hope in sublime cohort, and he stared back. 

They were a strange loop, mirrors reflecting mirrors until they could see infinity in each other. They knew this was not a death most people had the privilege of dying, and that they could die in this way because so many had given themselves in the moments… the moments leading up to what they had just done. Her father, his mother, Saw Gerrera, Bodhi Rook, Kaytoo, Chirrut Îmwe, Baze Malbus, Sergeant Melshi- dead, or not dead, yet, he would never know. Others, names with no faces, or faces with no names, people he remembered only by the sound of their voice, or a nervous tick, or a laugh, or their bellow across an airfield tarmac. So many of them dead now, and if not now, perhaps soon, all to buy Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso enough time to ascend into the looming heights of the Citadel and steal what needed to be stolen. Their actions seemed so small, now. Fight, climb. Stop for nothing, not fallen comrades or broken ribs, or fear. Cassian shot an Imperial officer and Jyn pushed a big red button, and above them, a Star Destroyer arrowed through the shield gate.

All of that was so far away, now. A dream, some other life. It had all seemed so urgent then, but now… other things became real.

Water and sand. The textures, the smells. He caught his breath, inhaled deeply, even though it hurt. There was salt, and smoke, and light, and her eyes. The quiet of it all, unnatural but welcome, and then the slow roar that built until he could feel the pressure of it in his eardrums, and the rumble of the planet through his knees where they knelt, protesting the abuse wrought by that _thing_ above them that he refused to think about anymore, ever again.

Jyn held him and she looked up, stared out to sea, but Cassian looked at the trees.

The light inside of him burned brighter than anything that spread on the horizon.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so upset... D:
> 
> RIP Carrie Fisher. I've been sitting on this for a few days, but I can't any longer. You were an inspiration to me, and shelter when things hurt. Star Wars would not be half as great as it is without you.


End file.
